this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2025
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Selfhosted

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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Looking for a selfhostable chat service that people on phone and computers can log onto (kbin.earth)
submitted 7 months ago by Howlinghowler110th@kbin.earth to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I'm not sure if this is the right place but me and my friend group have lately become privacy conscious and wanted to stop using discord and other types of social media, and only log onto self hosted options that only we can access.

we've eliminated something like Revolt (now named Stoat due to it missing ideal features and the developers being anti-decentralized (as well as being extremely hostile to the userbase noticably...)

Does anyone have any idea what would be an ideal service to use?

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[–] Howlinghowler110th@kbin.earth 7 points 7 months ago (5 children)

we've thought about this but the documentation isn't user friendly for self hosting. we're generally worried about undesirable people finding it which would not be good.

[–] artiman@piefed.social 9 points 7 months ago

you can make your instance invite only

[–] deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de 4 points 7 months ago

The documentation you were looking at might've been the Matrix specification.

There is documentation on how to host a Matrix server, I'd honestly recommend using containers (maybe docker compose) for this one. It can definitely be confusing setting up a service like a Matrix homeserver for the first time.

As for other people finding it, you can (and should) make your homeserver invite-only. It's also possible to disable federation, which makes the server self-contained. It will not accept incoming connections from other servers, nor make outgoing connections to other servers.

This does mean everyone you want to talk with has to be on your homeserver. There are probably better options available if you want to avoid Matrix' federation issues, like Spacebar.

[–] source_of_truth@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Disable registrations and just create your own users manually.

[–] derin@lemmy.beru.co 2 points 7 months ago

There is no risk of others finding it if you don't turn on federation. It becomes a fully private instance. Just set federation to false.

[–] JadedBlueEyes@programming.dev 1 points 7 months ago

Continuwuity.org has reasonable documentation, and you can (and should) disable signups or require a token to sign up.